Feverish
by TwinEnigma
Standard Disclaimer: I do not own the characters from the Batman franchise nor related indica, including the Dark Knight Saga. I do this for fun and skills building, not profit.
Warnings: none, drabble format
There is a pulse. It is weak, little more than a thread, but it is there.
His eyes shift rapidly under the closed lids.
"Is it true what they say – that she was, you know, involved?" the nurse asks as the other nurses clean away blood and fluid from the broken and comatose woman in the bed. In his arms, an infant, the raw ugly pink of one freshly born and already bearing a wisp of dark hair on his head, whimpers miserably.
Commissioner Gordon is quiet, leaving only the steady sound of the respirators to fill the void, and the nurse eventually turns away, question unanswered. The commissioner sees the fluttering tatters of black shadows in the window, shadows where there were none before, and lowers his eyes, avoiding the distant accusation and disappointment of a specter who once believed he could be something more.
There is nothing to say.
Gotham is a city that creates orphans. Who shall notice one more amidst their number?
He has the birth record of the Tate infant sealed anyway.
Alfred sees them for a moment; she with the poise and easy grace of a cat and he looking, at last, like all the weight of the past had been lifted from his shoulders. It is all that he has ever wished for the troubled boy who had become a son to him.
Then he blinks, and they are gone, as ephemeral as the mist that curls over the hills in the winter, leaving only the unfamiliar faces of a young Italian couple to replace an old man's fantasy.
One man dies and Batman rises.
The cape and cowl, the armor – it all embraces flesh once more and compels the legend to new, untold heights. A ghost, some say, a specter, and, to others, a fragmentary nightmare that unfolds in the darkness. To the police, he is an old friend, ageless and familiar, but at once a stranger. To the helpless and the powerful alike, his is the name invoked when desperation and horror are at their peak.
He is a savior, a symbol of hope and justice. He is Big Brother, ever-vigilant and wrathful. He has become both benediction and crutch. The city depends on him, his protection, his wisdom, his freedom of action, and so he has become their drug, their opiate of choice. Those that remember a time before him, before the dawning progression of this addiction, mourn the loss of world of aspiration and self-reliance. But it is futile to complain about it: he is a fact of Gotham now, the symbol of a city that has, perhaps, lost itself in some fundamental manner.
If he dreams of anything, it is not known to more than a handful, those that know him somehow, in some way. It is whispered that if one were to talk to these people, they would tell all that asked that when they had looked into the Bat's eyes they had seen nothing but disappointment and an immeasurable sorrow for what Gotham has become, as if he had expected something more of them and they had all failed.
He dies in the end, he always does. Gotham, after all, is his city and he loves it in spite of the faults.
And then, in the passing of time, he returns, revitalized and different.
One man dies.
Batman rises.
"The infection is getting worse," the prison doctor says, placing a water-soaked rag on the scorching flesh of his broken and battered foreign patient. "I do not think he will survive."
Bane narrows his eyes in displeasure and in a quiet, distorted drawl, states, "Then make sure he does."
His eyelids flutter and fail to open. The fever dreams begin anew.
There is a pulse.
AN: This was something that crawled out of my brain a while ago, but I only recently cleaned up and transcribed out of my notebook. Timeline wise, this is set in the part of the Dark Knight Rises where Bruce is in the Pit and is feverish and hallucinating. Dreams are not always nice things and, as such, aspects of his fears and worries play on aspects of his plans to form nightmarish "bad ending" or "tragic" versions of the universe. The first offers a nod to the "Son of Batman" arc as well as "Son of the Demon," in the form of an unnamed alternate "Damian Wayne." The second offers the downer view of that end scene, you know the one. The third references the fear that Gotham has become a problem for Gotham in a way that Bruce had never intended, but it also references the classical TV series where you had to wonder how ANYTHING got done without Batman. It also references the formation of a chain of succession and the concept of Batman as an immortal symbol.